Sympathy for the Devil
by Flamedancer33
Summary: 07 Movie-verse- It takes a lifetime to make a man who he is, and a heartbeat to change everything. Reginald Simmons deals with this in his own way.


See, kids, this is what I do when I say I'm writing something for one of my fics. I actually mean 'I'm writing another little blurb for this weird thing that I might or might not post'.

This has nothing to do with the song, by the way. I just thought it fit. These have no pattern or meaning behind them, really. It's just whatever I felt like writing at that second. This is actually a compilation of little bits written over the course of several months; it's what I do when I get stumped with my other stories. Some are funny, some not so much. The only real theme is that they're all Simmons-based. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: me own nothing.

---

"… you did sign the papers, right?"

Reggie-never-Reginald Simmons frowned at the man standing beside him, irritated by the question. Did he sign the papers, indeed. Like he'd had a choice, what with that man hounding him.

"Yeah," he answered sullenly. He was eighteen, still teenager enough to possess the screw-the-world attitude. His companion sighed and shook his head. Thomas Banachek, he'd been introduced as. Like the teen he'd been born into this job, so they'd be working fairly close together. He was determined not to show his irritation with the younger man; after all, he himself was only four years removed from the hell of being a teen. He could still remember every humiliating second.

They walked into the holding room for NBE-1's chamber. Tom turned to face the teen, who slouched and scowled back. "Ready?" he asked rhetorically.

"Sure," came the oh-so-thrilled response, and Tom smiled to himself. That attitude would be vanishing in about two seconds.

He pushed the button and the door hissed open to the room beyond, the air inside so cold it sucked the breath from their lungs. Not that Reggie was doing much breathing anyway, staring as he was at the towering metal figure before him, and Tom decided instantly that the annoyances of the past three hours could be forgiven as he watched wonder bloom across the boy's face.

"Meet NBE-1."

---

"My name is Reggie. I turned eight today and my dad's taking me to his work."

The woman smiled at him. The boy was immensely proud of himself; at least, she thought he was. She could only see the top of his head over the laminated counter. His father inexplicably scowled at the boy and tugged him away from the counter with slightly more force than was necessary.

"Ignore him," he said in a tone that was not to be argued with. He paid for the three candy bars his son had heaped on the counter and ushered the boy out.

Reggie waited until he was in the car before protesting. "But Dad," he whined in that nails-on-a-chalkboard only children could manage, "I was just gonna tell her 'bout the metal man-"

"No!" the man barked, and Reggie jumped. After a moment, his father continued in a quieter tone. "What have I told you about saying things like that?" The boy mumbled and sniffed indelicately, earning himself a scathing glare from his father. "Are you crying?"

"Nuh uh," came the wavering reply. He then ruined his effort by hiccupping.

Twenty minutes later, a loudly bawling Reggie Simmons was thrust into his surprised mother's arms. She stood on the porch of their house and watched her husband stride away.

He never came home.

---

"If it didn't work the first time, it's not gonna work the next two hundred and thirty-seven times, so for God's sake stop pushing that button or I will break every bone in your hand!"

The entire room went still as the last echoes of Reggie's voice faded. The man was staring at his assistant, breathing heavily as his temper simmered down. For three days he'd been working on this delicate project and now one clumsy man was on the verge of ruining it all. What had started as a calm and rational order had ended up being bellowed for everyone to hear.

"But sir-"

"Put. The remote. Down." Reggie ground out the words slowly and carefully, reminding himself that he was already behind and strangling the man would only slow him down more. He watched- glared evilly, really- until the remote was on the table. Then he pushed himself to his feet and stormed out. As the door was closing a familiar figure dropped into pace beside him. He lifted his chin a notch and scowled fiercely.

"I hate you."

"Don't think I need to ask how you're dealing," Tom answered in amusement.

"Why did you get promoted?" Reggie groused.

"You're in line next," came the soothing reply. "Pretty soon you'll be a field agent. Out of the lab."

"In four years," the younger man scoffed. Tom produced a badge and held it in front of Simmons' face.

"Is this what you want?" he asked pointedly. He received a dark glower in response. "Then go back and do your job. Prove to them that they can't do anything without you."

Reggie stopped and continued to scowl at his friend. "Fine," he muttered. He turned on his heel and headed back into the lab, pausing only long enough to shoot off one last comment.

"By the way, I still hate you."

---

Walter Banachek felt sorry for the family, really he did. Mary looked stunned, as though her husband's death was actually a shock to her. As though she hadn't been warned countless times, as his own wife had been, that theirs was a high-risk job. They were toying with things they could only pretend to understand, and it occasionally backfired. Of course, the official cause was listed as a car accident. They couldn't very well put 'an alien cube brought a refrigerator to life and it escaped and killed four people' on the death certificate.

But it was the son, Reggie, that really got Walt's sympathy. He wandered the church halls before the funeral, avoiding well-wishers and recoiling at offers of condolences. Walt's own son Tom had tried to talk to the boy, to no effect.

It was after the service that Walt finally found him. He was sprawled in the grass in front of the church. As Walt settled next to him the boy sat up and studied him intensely.

"Did the metal man kill my dad?" he asked suddenly, and Walt jerked his head around to peer at the boy.

"No," he said slowly.

"Oh."

Walt sat there for an hour with the boy, neither saying another word, and he couldn't help but wonder what sort of a father his partner had been that the man's son was disappointed by that answer.

---

They were in no danger, so helping them wasn't considered high priority. This unfortunately meant that Simmons had to stand in his underwear, chained to a street light and dripping alien robot piss, for almost twenty minutes. As humiliating as he found this scenario, however, he couldn't help but marvel at what he had just seen.

The new mechs were certainly an interesting crew, he thought. Ranging in size and color and weaponry- he'd hate to run into that black pickup in a dark alley. And they were awake and moving, which trumped NBE-1. From what he'd seen there was evidence of individual personalities and temperaments. Utterly amazing.

"The big one's gonna be trouble," the agent to his right muttered. Simmons considered this for a moment. Then he shrugged.

"We can handle him," he responded dismissively, and any other attempt at conversation was lost as a helicopter suddenly loomed over the bridge, shining a spotlight on them.

But really, Simmons had to wonder if he was telling the truth, for tonight had the feeling of being the beginning of the end.

---

"This is your own fault, you know."

Reggie growled at Tom, trying not to go cross-eyed as he attempted to fit a thin wire through a tiny hole. He had to do this five hundred times, and he was currently on number four. So far things were going remarkably slow.

"Five hours on the job, and you animate your pager." The older man shook his head at his young partner's foolishness.

"It was five inches tall, it couldn't possibly hurt anyone," Reggie grumbled as he finally responded to his friend's half-lecture.

"I'm sure someone said something similar about the refrigerator that killed your father."

"Stopped the buzzing," the younger man pointed out, sounding not in the remotest bit sorry for his actions.

"You're never going to get out of the lab if you keep this up."

"Sure I am," came the confident reply. "I'm descended from one of the First Seven. I'm practically royalty as far as these Sector 7 people are concerned." Tom groaned and Reggie grinned at him. "What are you complaining for? You're just like me."

"First time they let him near the dam," Tom muttered. "First chance he gets to impress someone important. What does he do? Bring his pager to life and says no one will care because of who his great-great-grandfather is."

"Anybody else would've been fired," Reggie pointed out, stopping his friend cold.

"No more abusing the cube, Reggie," Tom said finally. The younger man shrugged.

"All right. No more."

It was far too easy to ignore the fact that they both knew he was lying.

---

"It's probably just another crank call," Tom had said, sounding tired. "But we can't ignore it. Not with the Qatar base attack and the Air Force One hack. There's something out there and this kid might know where."

So Simmons sat in the front seat, bullying and threatening and wheedling and generally applying all of his information-gathering skills on the pair in the back. He was slowly arriving at the conclusion that these two were trying to use this stolen-car thing to hide something from their parents. The only odd thing was the radiation readings, but there were hundreds of things that could cause high rads. The two kids seemed so genuinely clueless he was verging on calling it quits when the car suddenly ceased its forward motion.

Simmons was jerked forward, then slammed back into his seat. He was aware of his mouth working but couldn't begin to guess what he was saying as he felt the _thump-thump-thump_ of something giant walking around and then the car was in the air, hanging for a moment then falling-

The agent looked up, squinting against the bright lights shining down on them, and studied the mech as it loomed over them. It was almost as big as NBE-1. And there were more, he saw, coming off the bridge behind them and pulling out weapons so big it looked like the black one could level a city block. Mechs. Awake and walking and gloriously _alive_.

It was his greatest dream and his worst nightmare, all in one.

---

Somehow, when he'd pictured his own death, he'd imagined something grander and more impressive than 'death by mini-mutant'. And yet there it was. He could hear the psycho little machine muttering to itself just outside the doors, only temporarily hindered by their laughable excuse at a barricade, and he idly wondered how long until the thing broke through and killed them all.

Not that he wanted to die, of course. It was just difficult for him to accept how radically- and how quickly- the world around him was changing. Sector 7 was already obsolete, and Simmons was in serious danger of going down with it. He was a dinosaur- he'd had his reign, and now he was slipping by the wayside. And to add insult to that grievous injury, he was being replaced by a teenager with barely a clue how the world worked, who was struggling just with getting a date.

In some ways death just seemed like the easiest answer.

He fingered the flamethrower and eyed the door, dented and hanging off a hinge. He had no intention of dying today, and if that obnoxious metal monkey thought differently it was just too bad. Reginald Simmons wasn't going anywhere.

---

"You're kidding, right?"

Secretary of Defense Keller stared at him, fingertips resting on the table between them. He was having a hard day. Technically they both were, but the difference was that Keller's day had only just begun, whereas Simmons' had ended after NBE-1- Megatron- had died.

"No, I'm not kidding," the secretary said slowly. He would kill for an aspirin. Or a bottle of scotch. "I've already talked to the President. Sector 7 is officially disbanded. You have several choices. You can go into the CIA; they're always looking for people like you. Or you could go into the FBI. Someplace where your… unique skills wouldn't go to waste."

"Or I could become the government-Autobot liaison," Simmons finished for him. The older man nodded once. "Conveniently forgetting that all the Autobots currently hate my guts."

"Those are your choices," Keller responded. He'd never particularly liked this man, and he hated the fact that, no matter what Simmons chose, they'd be in close contact for the duration of his stay in office.

Simmons stared at him, jaw working in agitation. He looked down at the badge on the table between them. One hand reached forward, fingers brushing over the worn leather billfold, and for a moment he looked lost. Like his only reason for existing had just been yanked away. Which, Keller supposed, it had.

"Take me to the 'bots," the former agent said finally, and Keller smiled to himself. Pain in the ass though Simmons may be, he was perfect for this job. No one, human or mech, was going to be able to walk all over him, and the Autobots desperately needed someone like that on their side.

"Consider this a learning experience," he offered, and received a gimlet glare in return. "Oh, come off it. What could possibly go wrong?"

And Simmons, ever the realist, laughed.

---

"God, I'm old."

"I'm older."

The bartender glanced over her shoulder, studying the two men sitting at the counter. It was a little after four in the afternoon and they were dressed in classic black suits that practically bellowed 'law enforcement'. She wondered why they were here- a rundown bar fifteen minutes after opening in a backwater town twenty miles east of the Hoover Dam.

"Twenty years," the younger one moaned into his beer. "Almost to the day. I remember when the director gave me that badge…"

"Look, there's Marilyn," the other one said as he gestured to an old black-and-white picture on the wall. "Go say hi."

"Shut up. I mean, I was on top of the world. I felt like I ruled the universe."

"Hate to tell you, but it wasn't just that day. You've acted that way your entire life."

"And what happens?" The younger man snorted and rolled the side of his bottle along the scarred wood of the counter. "I got old. When did I say I wanted to get old? I would have preferred to be twenty-seven forever."

"Too bad no one asked you," his comrade responded mildly.

Before anything more could be said, the younger man's cell phone rang. He answered it with a sharp "Simmons here", and as he listened his grip on the beer bottle tightened until the glass was in serious danger of cracking. Finally he hung up and shot his companion a quick glance.

"Know where Qatar is?" he asked.

"No."

"You're about to find out."

The bartender turned and watched as they shrugged into their jackets and walked out, leaving a twenty on the counter. She glanced at the old man wiping down the tables.

"Who were they?" she asked. He snorted and shook his head.

"Better that you don't know, girlie. Better that you have no clue."

---

Simmons grabbed the handle of the car door as they hit another pothole. He let out an explosive curse as his head hit the top of the car in the resulting bounce. The car itself groaned in protest, its shocks long past saving and its undercarriage in serious danger of being shredded. Next to him Tom cursed as well as he hauled the wheel around, trying to keep them on the narrow path that was far better suited to a bicycle than a car.

Being an agent wasn't normally this much fun. Most times they were dealing with inner-government paper pushers, desk jockeys, and the occasionally nosy Congressman's lackey who had stumbled across the ghost of a paper trail and tracked it back to a government sector that didn't exist. Occasionally he dealt with nutcases who knew more about the NBEs than they should- most often hallucinations as a result of an interesting cocktail of semi-legal drugs. Sometimes he'd go gallivanting across the country to investigate an odd occurrence, of which not one bore any relevance to his job.

Rarely did he discover a person who actually knew what they were talking about, as he had this time. They were dealt with in a decidedly unfriendly manner- there was no trusting people, especially the anti-government conspiracy theorists who were the ones most inclined to discover the truth.

"God damn it!" Tom snapped as he slammed on the brakes. The trail had ended abruptly, leading into a clearing in which sat their target's abandoned bicycle. Simmons waited until the car stopped making those alarming wheezing noises before getting out. There was no point in searching the forest around them; neither had any knowledge of the area, whereas their quarry had grown up here.

Before Simmons could offer up a snarky and largely undeserved comment, there was a loud _crack_ and something panged off the car's grill. Tom ducked, yanking his door open and dropping behind it, but Simmons took off and vanished into the trees.

"Reggie!" Tom bellowed into the silence that followed. He could imagine the look on their boss' face when he heard of Simmons' latest stunt and how it had gotten the young idiot killed. The barking of a handgun put an end to those thoughts and he half-stood, praying and waiting. A few moments later Simmons strolled out of the woods, hauling an unconscious man behind him.

"Bagged and tagged," he said proudly, and Tom had to resist the urge to shoot him.

"One of these days that gung-ho attitude is going to get you in trouble," he predicted.

"But not today."

---

The day he made agent was probably the proudest in his life.

Sector 7 was a group with a small number of people and a large number of jobs to be done. Due to this, everyone needed to serve in the lab for a few years, and Reggie's turn had been less like a job and more like a tour of duty in Korea. Countless were the times someone had said 'too bad he's the son of the First Seven, otherwise he'd be fired'. His friend Tom had despaired of his ever reaching the exalted status of S7 field agent; sometimes Reggie himself had wondered if he would ever make it.

But make it he did, and at the tender age of twenty-seven, he stood before the Director and accepted his badge.

"Call me Agent Simmons," he said proudly, and probably obnoxiously, as he flashed his badge at everything that moved. "Not Reggie. Not anymore. Agent Simmons."

When he'd said this to Tom, who was Agent-Banachek-not-Tom, his friend had smiled sadly and shaken his head.

"Don't be in too big a hurry to get rid of Reggie," he said warningly. "Agent Simmons is going to need someone on his side."

Instead of explaining that Tom, who is Tom once again, had bought him a drink at the nearby bar and they'd both gotten totally wasted. The bartender even had some embarrassing pictures of Reggie trying to make out with a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe. Twenty-odd years later and the details of that night were still a little fuzzy- if not gone entirely- but Simmons clearly remembered what Tom had said that day.

And he knew he would regret not listening for the rest of his life.


End file.
